It is headquartered in San Francisco at the Earl Warren Building,[1] but it regularly holds sessions in Los Angeles and Sacramento.

[3] Since 1850, the court has issued many influential decisions in a variety of areas including torts, property, civil and constitutional rights, and criminal law.

The nominee can then immediately fill an existing vacancy, or replace a departing justice at the beginning of the next judicial term.

If a nominee is confirmed to fill a vacancy that arose partway through a judicial term, the justice must stand for retention during the next gubernatorial election.

During the late 1920s, the court gradually transitioned to routinely hearing all appeals in bank, apart from two unusual exceptions in 1941 when it again tried to sit in departments.

[18] Six current justices were appointed by Democrats (Liu, Kruger, Groban, Jenkins, Guerrero and Evans) and one by Republicans (Corrigan).

[23] The Court is open for business year-round (as opposed to operating only during scheduled "terms" as is commonplace in jurisdictions that observe the legal year).

[23] The California Constitution requires suspension of the justices' salaries if the Court fails to then file a decision within 90 days.

New opinions are published online on Monday and Thursday mornings at 10 a.m. Paper copies also become available through the clerk's office at that time.

[23] Since the late 1980s, the Court has turned away from the traditional use of law clerks, and has switched to permanent staff attorneys.

[25] Justices Goodwin Liu and Leondra Kruger, however, have returned to the traditional use of recent law school graduates as one-year clerks for some of their staff positions.

[26][27] The advantage to this system is that the reduced turnover of staff attorneys (versus the traditional system of rotating through new law clerks every year) has improved the efficiency of the court in dealing with complex cases, particularly death penalty cases.

[2][14] This resulted in provisions in the 1879 Constitution requiring the Court to decide all cases in writing with reasons given[2][28] (to get rid of minor cases, it had often given summary dispositions with no reasons given[2][14]) and requiring California judges to certify in writing every month that no matter submitted for consideration had been outstanding for more than 90 days, or else they will not be paid.

[2][29][30] To comply with the latter provision, the Court does not schedule oral argument until the justices and their staff attorneys have already studied the briefs, formulated their respective positions, and circulated draft opinions.

Then, after the matter is formally "argued and submitted" before the Court, the justices can polish and file their opinions well before reaching the 90-day deadline.

This differs sharply from the practice in all other federal and state appellate courts, where judges can schedule oral argument not long after written briefing is finished, but then may take many months (or even a year) after oral argument to file their opinions.

[2] Since oral argument was not mandatory except for in bank hearings of appeals, the justices began to assign cases to the commissioners which could likely be resolved on the briefs alone.

[2] In retrospect, the commissioners can be seen as an important precursor of the law clerks and staff attorneys which the Court began to hire in the 1930s.

"[2] Originally, this was followed by a one-line unsigned per curiam statement in the name of "The Court," such as: "For the reasons given in the foregoing opinion the judgment is affirmed.

"[2] Starting in 1892, the three justices who reviewed and summarily adopted each commissioners' opinion began to also sign their names.

[2] Except for one decade at its founding, the Court has never been required by constitutional or statutory law to publish all its opinions.

[2] A small group of lawyers later recovered and compiled all the unreported opinions filed by the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court Commission before that point, which were published in a separate seven-volume reporter called California Unreported Cases starting in 1913.

Many important legal concepts have been pioneered or developed by the Court, including strict liability for defective products, fair procedure, negligent infliction of emotional distress, palimony, insurance bad faith, wrongful life, and market-share liability.

The major film studios in and around Hollywood and the high-tech firms of Silicon Valley both fall under the Court's jurisdiction.

The California citation style, however, has always been the norm of common law jurisdictions outside the United States, including England, Canada and Australia.